The Leading Edge - A College Rejection is Not the End of the World...or Your Life

After the initial disappointment of not getting into their top choice wears off,
most college students feel like failures not from the rejection.
It comes from internalizing the feeling they have let their parents down.
These are the parents who were over-invested in the result from the start,
who can't get over their disappointment
and will have a hard time hearing and accepting this.

"Mark,
you could provide a real service to students and their parents if you
could suggest two things to them. I can't do it, because I am currently
fielding the 'why not my kid?' calls that I am being flooded with. Few
of them are ready to hear it and certainly not from me," a Dean of
Admissions at an Ivy League college told me yesterday.

He
explained that most college students that don't get into their top
choice, feel deeply upset and disappointed at first. It is natural and
even healthy to feel those feelings and even vent to their parents
their upset. At that point parents should respond with: "Oh God, that's
awful I can tell how upset you are and I'm sorry." Then the parents
should stop talking and let their kids continue to vent. In most cases
they will get it out of their systems in a matter of one to several
days.

After their upset has peaked and is calming down, they
should say something like: "I'm really excited about the choices you
have from the colleges that did accept you and the next four years
you're going to have will be amazing in ways you can't imagine." You
don't want to say this too soon. If you do, it's as if you are trying
to talk them out of being initial upset, which they have earned the
right to feel after all the work they put in at high school and going through the application process.

The
second suggestion had to do with something so very painful and so very
unnecessary that he sees so often. Within a few days, children are
usually ready and able to move on past their disappointment. They begin
to envision and enthusiastically look forward to going to the
college(s) they were accepted to.

What gets in the way are
parents who can't get past their own disappointment in the college
rejection. Rather than the parents and children accepting that college
acceptance is very arbitrary and capricious, the parents continue to
look chagrined and downcast. They say they feel badly for their
children, when the parents are the ones feeling more upset and who
can't move on. He said that in such situations, students tend to look
at their parents and internalize their mother and father's
disappointment into feeling as if the child has failed them.

The
Dean concluded: "Getting parents to separate their own disappointment
from that of their child's is the single greatest obstacle to the child
getting over and past it."